


And the Mercy Seat is Awaiting

by thereweregiants



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Cults, M/M, Post-Fall of Overwatch, Post-Relationship Angst, more questions than answers, not a sexy fic sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-03-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:01:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23370619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thereweregiants/pseuds/thereweregiants
Summary: You can't argue with fanatics, so Reaper doesn't even try.He understands them, though. At least this particular set.
Relationships: Reaper | Gabriel Reyes/Soldier: 76 | Jack Morrison
Comments: 11
Kudos: 55





	And the Mercy Seat is Awaiting

**Author's Note:**

> sometimes quarantines make you grab a hundred word, months old WIP and decide to finish it.   
> I dunno man it's a weird one
> 
> title from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' [The Mercy Seat](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq6T2tvRDoY)  
> written to Heroin and Your Veins' Regret

Here is the problem with becoming a symbol -

Here is the problem with becoming more than a man -

Here is the problem with being the international recognized face -

Here is the problem with being blond and blue eyed and beautiful -

\- sometimes people make the mistake of believing in you.

-x-x-x-x-x-

They knew. 

Somehow they knew.

Reaper wasn’t aware that anyone knew of his sad little Achilles heel - anyone outside of Moira, who helped him design his uniform. 

But alas, no creature is an island - particularly not in Talon where the red is tape as often as it is blood. Moira has a dozen underlings and there were another dozen companies to obtain materials from and when you throw in wild cards like Sombra - well.

As much as they like to play at secrets, Talon is a bureaucracy and that means it’s a colander as much as anything else. 

In the end it comes down to bare hands and leather straps - flesh and more flesh, trapping Reaper in one place. He can slip through hair thin cracks without a thought, molecules arranging and rearranging in ways he prefers not to think about. But put a barrier of something that once breathed and thought? An arm or a suede belt, anything as long as it was once alive? Wrap a child’s finger around him, and Reaper is given feet of clay. 

They hold him and they put a black bag over his head and they hit him over and over, not that it does much good. Reaper goes along with it, out of curiosity more than anything else at this point. Who are they, and how do they know about him? Where do they live and how fast can he kill them? How much will he make it hurt?

Reasonable questions. 

He’s put in a chair and someone who knows what they’re doing secures him. His gloves are pulled off, and he finds a thread of pleasure at the silence and then small noises of disgust as his blackened hands and claws are revealed. The places where skin is bared or shows through his uniform - wrists, biceps, that sliver of grey skin beneath his jaw between gorget and mask - get a smear of something cold, then the familiar stickiness of medical electrodes are pressed on.

After long minutes where nothing happens. Reaper shifts as much as he is able to in his chair. “Wha-” he starts to say, before being cut off by his head snapping back and jaw clenching shut, arms shaking in their restraints. 

Electrocution can’t kill him. It’s been tried before, by people far more skilled in torture than this. It still disrupts what he is now, confuses his nanites so he can’t get free. Once again he doesn’t know who talked to these people about his personal failings, but once he finds out he is going to break their bones slowly. Reaper tries speaking a few more times before giving up with a numb tongue and a slower recovery each time the current goes through him. It’s clear that whoever these people are, they’re operating on their own timeline.

Hours pass.

Reaper’s world is limited to the faint sounds of shuffling feet, quiet whispers just out of audible range, his own breathing inside his mask that he normally can ignore. He’s patient, but that doesn’t mean he’ll willingly stay here forever.

Finally, finally, footsteps come close. Someone pulls the bag - some kind of leather sack - off of his head, and Reaper blinks behind his mask in the light. He is in some kind of room: he can’t tell how large because there is a spotlight of some kind directly above him, his vision limited to a patch of concrete floor and the man in front of him. 

The man is - generic looking, like someone advertised for ‘bland’ and then took the average of all the applicants. Utterly forgettable, except for a light in his eyes that speaks to something odd. Something dangerous.

He reaches forward, hands going to the sides of Reaper’s mask.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Reaper says, a glaze of boredom over his tone. He doesn’t actually care, one way or another.

The light in the bland man’s eyes flares, and he smiles a bit as he pulls the mask off. As he looks at Reaper’s face the smile fades, his skin paling until he looks like a bad wax replica of himself. Reaper can hear the sound of several unconscious bodies hitting the floor, outside of the circle of light. 

With shaking hands, the man puts the mask back. Underneath, Reaper smiles.

As the man composes himself, Reaper uses the time to look him over. He’s wearing odd clothes - shapeless, blue. A navy long sleeved shirt and pants tucked into oddly military boots, with a lighter blue open sleeveless robe over top. The whole outfit seems curiously out of time, like it could have come from a thousand years ago as easily as it could have from some strange trendy store. Nothing about the man seems normal, seems store-bought, however. 

He makes Reaper uneasy for reasons he can’t put his finger on.

“We’re so glad you could be here with us,” he says. He even sounds bland - American, midwest, a newscaster with the personality sucked out. 

“Us,” Reaper repeats.

The man moves his hand slightly and the lights in the room come up. Reaper ignores the technicalities of where he is to look over - the people.

His vision is wavery from the electricity still, and the numbers seem to go back and forth between a dozen and a hundred of them, filling the space. All in the same blue over blue, all with blank and blandly smiling faces. 

“We’ve waited so long for this,” the man says with that light in his eyes shining a little brighter. Before Reaper can respond, electricity shoots through his body once more, longer and longer until everything goes black.

-x-x-x-x-x-

Reaper awakens to murmuring. 

He is somewhere else - far from the concrete of before, here everything is clean white walls and polished wood supports. Angular walls, rows of wooden seats, high arched ceilings.

Reaper’s brain is trying to come up with something other than ‘church’ but is failing. It’s reinforced by the rows of bowed heads in front of him - the source of the murmuring. They’re speaking in unison, too soft for Reaper to understand but it has the cadence of ritual.

A man in the front row stands - the bland one from before. He turns, facing the dozens of bowed heads. He speaks quietly along with them for a minute or two before his voice rises. “He was our moral compass,” he says, and the crowd echoes him as they raise their heads. 

Cocking his head slightly, Reaper lets the words wend through his mind. They’re...familiar, somehow.

The bland man is speaking again. “Brothers and sisters,” he says. “The time has finally come to right the largest wrong, the most important wrong our world has ever known. The Lord God has the Devil to balance him, we know that every light casts a shadow. It has been too long out of balance, my brethren. Too long has dark reigned after extinguishing the light!”

Oh. Cults.

How boring.

Reaper tunes him out at that point. Once you’ve heard one cult, you’ve heard them all, really. Whether it’s something sanctioned and accepted by the general public or some odd little group buried in a small town, it all comes down to the same thing. Us versus them, whatever definition of good and evil they want to use, absolute obedience and lord help you if you toe the party line. 

He wonders idly why they grabbed him up. They were prepared - this wasn’t just ‘grab a creepy figure in black’ or even ‘grab a Talon operative’, they were specifically ready to deal with Reaper. He tunes back in to the man’s speech, which grows ever more impassioned with arms waving in the air.

“The Devil walks among us. He walks here amongst you, my brothers! He walks here amongst you, my sisters! The Devil has been given a face and a body, and pray that you were not in the room when we beheld it for it many were overcome with horror.”

Wimps, Reaper thinks.

“The Devil has a body and he is here and is called the Reaper, and we have him here with us now.” Reaper does his best to wave with his blackened fingers. He can see looks of disgust on the nearest people to him, and smiles to himself. “The Devil is here in the Reaper’s flesh, but we know who he is descended from, do we not? He is come from the man who snuffed out the light itself, Gabriel Reyes!”

Reaper’s smile disappears.

The number of people who know who Reaper used to be is...limited. Ana. Jack. Doomfist and Moira. Sombra, damn her eyes. Outside of them - no one knows. No one is supposed to know. And now he’s faced with a hundred people quietly chanting his name and for the first time since this incident began, Reaper feels a small thread of uncertainty wind its way through him.

“We will not rest until the ones behind this attack are brought to justice,” intones the bland man, and the group quietly murmurs  _ brought to justice _ over and over again until the words lose meaning. Once again Reaper could swear that the man is quoting something  _ familiar, _ and can’t for the life of him think of what it is. 

The bland man and two other men come up, picking up the chair that Reaper is strapped to. They turn him around and though the view in front of him is blocked, Reaper can see a stone font to the right of him, presumably full of holy water. 

The two assistants melt back behind Reaper, as the bland man dips his hands in the font up to his wrists. He walks behind Reaper and suddenly slaps both dripping hands to Reaper’s forehead, forcing his skull back against the top of the chair. He’s whispering something in Reaper’s ear but none of it processes because now Reaper is facing the front of the sanctuary and all he can see is - him. 

Jack.

A fifteen foot high wood panel, lacquered and shining under the lights. Jack Morrison in full Strike Commander uniform, his hair and insignia and Overwatch details all gleaming with gold leaf. He stares out into the sanctum, blue eyes luminous with inlaid gems. Reaper puts together all the niggling little details that have been bothering him - the outfits, the oddly familiar words, the slavish devotion that can only come from someone who has been made a symbol - and is nauseated at what he comes up with.

A Jack Morrison cult, and the former Gabriel Reyes is its personal demon.

The constant whispering in Reaper’s ear finally separates out into words. “Nipson anomēmata mē monan opsin,” the man says over and over again, and a memory pokes at the back of Reaper’s mind.  _ Wash the sins, not only the face _ says the voice of a long ago priest from Gabriel’s grandmother’s church, and the uncertainty in Reaper starts to morph into something colder.

The bland man turns Reaper’s mask towards him and Reaper now sees the blandness as Jack’s All-American beauty flayed of personality and charm. The light in his eyes has only grown brighter and more terrifying.

“You are going to save us all,” he says, voice full of ecstasy, before injecting something into Reaper’s neck.

The world goes dark and Reaper doesn’t know if he wants to wake up after.

-x-x-x-x-x-

Reaper comes to in a wash of pain.

It’s rare that anything truly hurts these days - you have to have functional nerves in order to process pain, and he doesn’t have many of those left. Every one remaining to Reaper seems to be firing right now, however, along the tight cords wrapped around his body and holding his arms spread. His armor is gone, he’s stripped down to thin black compression pants and little else. Nothing remains of Reaper’s image but for his mask, and he’s sure they left it on for their own comfort rather than his.

There’s a soothing breeze on the air, and he can feel it through his ribs.

He squints behind his mask - everything is overbright and saturated. The sky is a painfully blazing blue, cloudless and looking like it would shatter if you tapped it. In front of him is a sea of gold, waves curling across the surface as the wind slithers its way across. 

Corn, acres and acres of cornfields with not a speck of humanity to be seen.

Reaper remembers the first time he - the first time Gabriel, that is - visited Indiana with Jack. They’d been on some mission close to the holidays, and knowing there wouldn’t be time for him to get back to LA, Jack dragged him back to the Morrison family farm. Jack loved the open air, how he could see for miles in every direction. 

Gabriel had been uneasy. He was a child of cities, of skyscrapers and twisty alleys and boundaries set in concrete and steel. Seeing the endless rippling fields made him wonder what lurked in there, made him wonder how easy it would be to get lost in the stalks taller than his head. 

Now, a lifetime later, Reaper looks out over those same fields. He’s strapped to a wooden structure - a cross of some kind. His head is still foggy from whatever he was injected with but he’s sure that he doesn’t like where this is going.

The sound of footsteps, and the bland man is standing on the small wooden platform in front of Reaper. The pockets of his robe bulge, something unseen and softly clinking inside of them. The man holds a hammer easily in his hand - something large and battered and dark, the steel of it old and well-used.

“The balance is going to be restored,” he tells Reaper earnestly. “You took him away, but now you’ll watch over us all.”

Reaper didn’t kill Jack Morrison and neither did Gabriel Reyes. It’s not just that Jack survived to become Soldier 76, the explosion hadn’t been his fault at all. Reaper has his own private theories about who it was and the long line of bodies he’s been leaving has been bringing him closer and closer to the truth. As much as Jack and Overwatch like to pretend otherwise, Reaper hasn’t killed any innocents. He gets the feeling that this man isn’t going to accept that explanation, though.

The man takes something from his pocket - a nail, long and shining. Too dark for steel: iron, perhaps. He presses it against the palm of Reaper’s left hand, pushing his hand against the wood behind. Reaper curls his fingers in, claws catching and tearing at the bland man’s hands. He doesn’t seem to notice the blood trickling down from the deep cuts Reaper is inflicting, just brings his hammer up calmly.

It hurts so much more than Reaper expects it to.

A bright shock of pain in the center of his palm, radiating out until his hand seems to go numb but for a status fuzz of stinging everywhere. Reaper blinks slowly against the feeling, and nearly misses the bland man pulling out another nail.

This one is strange. Not metal, something pale with dark streaks. An irregular shape, but for the wicked point that the man sets between the tendons of Reaper's wrist. He taps the nail in, and Reaper’s hand futilely twitches and tries to curl in, stopped by the first nail holding it down. This one through the wrist though...it feels heavy, somehow. Like it’s tying him down more than just holding him to the wood behind.

“Ingenious, isn’t it?” the man says, voice overjoyed like a child with a present. “The congregation was so devoted that they made donations to make sure you would be up here forever to watch over us.” He taps the back of his hand, wiggling his fingers so the bones and tendons shift under the skin. “Metatarsals, you know. The only ones long enough.” 

Reaper thinks about how many handless men are wandering around with Jack’s words on their lips. Thinks about how Jack would feel if he knew.

The man keeps rambling on about Reaper looking out over them forever, but all Reaper can focus on are the nails being pounded through his arm and into the wood beyond. Once the man gets to Reaper’s elbow he switches sides, tapping a nail into Reaper’s right hand. It hurts too much to try and scratch at the man, not now when he knows it won’t do any good.

Reaper has never felt helpless, not since he became Reaper. Somehow, though, these idiots were a mile ahead of him the whole time, so much so that Reaper didn’t even know he was in the race. Now he’s held down with bone and iron and sinew, and there’s nothing he can do.

Kneeling at Reaper’s feet, the bland man rotates something into position, then tugs Reaper’s left foot onto it. It’s a piece of wood, sloping downwards at a steep angle. Nothing that Reaper could stand on, and he doesn’t understand what’s happening as the man tries to make Reaper’s foot point downwards, like a ballet dancer’s.

It’s a small act of rebellion, but Reaper refuses to let his foot bend. The man sighs, looking up. “It’s inevitable, you know,” he says, and something in his face almost makes Reaper think that it’s true. “You’ll be safe here with us, don’t you worry.” The gentle words are belied by him swinging the heavy hammer back and slamming it forward, shattering Reaper’s ankle joint. 

He would make a noise of pain, but most of Reaper’s energy is devoted to making sure his lungs are still working. With nothing holding him up but the nails in his arms and a few cords, breathing has become unexpectedly difficult.

Reaper barely notices when the nail goes into his foot, slipping easily between the bones there and sinking deep into the wood. When the man goes to grab his right foot, Reaper kicks out the best he can, hitting the man in the face. He can feel the man’s nose break, but he holds Reaper’s foot with surprising strength. 

He smiles up at Reaper, teeth very white through the ignored blood that sheets down from his nose. “I was wondering if you had any fight left in you,” he says lightly. “That’s good, the better to protect us.” 

When the hammer hits Reaper’s ankle, it doesn’t stop after one time. It keeps going until the bones are puzzle pieces, shifting around in a battered bag of skin. The man moves Reaper’s foot, connected to the rest of his leg by nothing more than the skin covering it and perhaps a lone tendon or two, and nails it into position. 

He stands, steps back, reviews his work. The hammer gets tucked away and scissors come out. They snip at the leather cords that tie him to the wood, falling away one by one until Reaper is held up by nothing more than the iron and bone piercing his limbs.

“You took away our god and now we are returning the favor,” he says, scissors disappearing into a pocket. If it wasn’t for the blood on his face he’d look like - like anyone. “You’ll be here until you die, if you can die, and stay until your bones are worn away by the wind.” The man sounds so matter of fact about it, like it’s not insanity from start to finish. 

The man reaches up, cradles Reaper’s face in his hands. Thumbs smooth over the cheekbones of his mask in a parody of tenderness. “You are evil, but everyone can be redeemed,” he says earnestly. “The world is in balance now, you’ll see.” He steps back, smiling like a child on his birthday. He goes down the ladder attached to the wooden platform he was standing on, and wheels the platform away.

Reaper looks down as best he can, sees at least a dozen feet between him and the ground. 

Breathing is harder with every passing minute, as he sags from his nailed down forearms, shoulders straining in their sockets. His feet are useless, nailed down vertically and reduced to mixed up jumbles of bone, besides.

Reaper takes in shuddering breath after breath, and looks out over the endless, empty fields that darken in the coming night.

-x-x-x-x-x-

Days pass.

-x-x-x-x-x-

Days pass.

-x-x-x-x-x-

Days pass.

-x-x-x-x-x-

When the platform is wheeled over and into position, Reaper assumes it’s wishful thinking. When the white hair and red visor and garish uniform pop up into view, he figures he’s hallucinating. Perhaps it’s the setting, perhaps the insanity of the cult has infected him too, but Reaper has been lost in Gabriel’s memories, memories of better times. Sometimes of worse times. Anything to let his brain protect him from the endless monotony of gold fields and blue sky that likes to morph into gold hair and blue eyes that look at Reaper with love and betrayal and accusation.

Soldier 76 leans on his rifle, looking Reaper over. Long minutes go by, until he straightens, uses the rifle to poke Reaper in the thigh. 

Reaper bites into and through his lip, gets enough spit and blood to wet his tongue so he can say, “Fuck you.” His voice is wind over ground glass, as insubstantial as ash.

“Don’t blame me, you don’t look much alive,” Soldier says, no repentance in his voice. 

“This is your fault, you know.”

Soldier is silent, eyes hidden behind his visor. Reaper knows him too well, though, knows what the slight tightening of his fingers on his rifle’s butt means, can see the minute shifting of his weight. 

“Did you see the church?” Reaper asks, though he doesn’t expect a response.

“We’d been hoping that someone got to you,” Soldier says, like Reaper hadn’t said anything. “Someone from Overwatch, maybe McCree. Hell, maybe someone at Talon got sick of your shit.” 

“No, just a bunch of unpopular kids trailing after the prettiest boy in school.”

Reaper can see the edge of Soldier’s jaw behind the mask, knows that he’s grinding his teeth. He smiles to himself, dried out lips cracking and bleeding.

“You know I want you gone,” Soldier says, and Reaper notes the word ‘gone’, knows that it’s Jack that keeps Soldier from saying ‘dead’. “But this - isn’t right.”

Reaper cocks his head. “Thought you’d feel right at home, John Francis. All the trappings of home.”

“I could leave you here for the crows to eat,” Soldier says mildly, before pointedly looking him over. “Looks like they already started.” Reaper doesn’t tell him that birds stay well away from him, scarecrow that he is. What’s missing from him was already long gone before this debacle.

After a minute of silence, Soldier steps forward, peering at the nails holding Reaper up. He’s close, closer to Reaper than they’ve been since the explosion. He can feel the filtered air from Soldier’s mask exhaling against the weatherbeaten skin of his chest. He’s close enough that he can see through the visor, see the eyes behind the red veil. They look up, meet Reaper’s own eyes. He wonders if Soldier can see behind the shadows of his mask. 

Soldier reaches up, touches the edge of Reaper’s mask. Blunt fingers easily find the latch at the side, and Reaper takes a breath.

“Jack. Don’t.”

A long pause, then the hand falls away. Soldier steps back, looks at Reaper’s feet, bends to get a closer look. Reaper can’t tell what they look like, his view blocked by his mask and chest. He doubts it’s pretty. 

“You’re gonna have to rebreak these,” Soldier says from where he’s kneeling. He looks up, and Reaper’s breath catches in his throat. If he had enough blood to get to his dick he’d likely be hard at the memories sweeping through him, but he’s too much of a wreck right now. All thoughts of sex evaporate a few moments later at the sheer agony coming from his feet. There’s a soft sound as Jack sets one nail aside, and Reaper carefully moves his leg for the first time in weeks. 

The other nail comes out, and Reaper hadn’t realized how much weight he’d somehow managed to rest on his feet because now his shoulders are screaming. Soldier stands up, and pats Reaper none too gently on the chest. “Well, that’s -”

Reaper doesn’t know what else he might have said, because his left shoulder slips out of its socket, his bodyweight now dangling from one shoulder and stretched tendons. He doesn’t make a noise, he doesn’t have the breath for it, so he can hear Soldier curse quietly. 

Solder reaches up, tries to get the nail out of Reaper’s left palm. After so long in his body, so long in the atmosphere, it’s rusted, solidifying in both the wood and Reaper’s flesh. Soldier strips off his gloves, pries at the nail with his bare fingers. He steps back, patting at his pockets. A folding knife comes out, and if Reaper had breath he would laugh. An anniversary gift, from a lifetime ago. It does the job, the flaking iron nail pulled slowly out of Reaper’s flesh.

A river of blood and pus comes out after it, which both men ignore. Either Reaper will survive it or he won’t, no use worrying about it now. One nail after another comes out, each one followed by a torrent of fluids that is Reaper’s body rejecting what’s been forced into it. The bone ones are worse, seeming to want to cling to the flesh and tendon that they’re piercing. 

Finally the last one comes out, and Reaper’s useless dislocated arm flops down. Soldier pushes Reaper back against the wooden center stake with one hand, takes his arm in the other, fingers wrapped around Reaper’s now-withered bicep. “Deep breath,” he murmurs, and shoves the shoulder back in place. 

If he hadn’t been so used to massive amounts of pain at this point, Reaper likely would have passed out. As it is he lets out an involuntary wheeze, his lungs finally given some rest. He’s balancing on his ankles that have healed wrongly, but it’s better than it was before. 

Reaper leans against Soldier as he picks out the last of the nails one by one, smearing black blood and orange rust and yellow pus down his bright uniform. When the last nail comes out Reaper collapses, falling into Soldier’s arms. Soldier bears his weight to the ground, sitting on the platform with Reaper draped across his lap like a cursed, infected pietà. Both men are breathing hard with exertion, breaths slowing as they calm down.

“I only did it because -” Soldier starts, then stops. 

Reaper understands.

Soldier would easily, happily shoot Reaper dead in the face, but this...this was something stranger, something darker. Something they knew was not Reaper nor Gabriel’s fault and yet was laid at his feet. It’s not Jack’s either and yet - 

And yet. 

And yet he feels responsible because there’s enough of Jack Morrison still in Soldier 76 and they both know it. 

Soldier moves around, slides Reaper off of his lap. He lays him down on the platform, more gently than either of them expect. He stands, staring down at the broken, leaking body at his feet.

“The next time I see you I’ll kill you,” he says. 

“I wouldn’t expect anything less,” Reaper replies, the ruins of his mouth quirking up slightly behind his mask. 

Soldier climbs down from the platform, and Reaper hears a motorcycle start up a minute later. He listens to the roar as it slowly fades, eventually overtaken by the soft buzz of insects and sigh of the wind. Although he’s now alone he doesn’t wonder about the cult. Soldier - Jack - took care of them, he’s sure. One way or another.

As he stares up into the blue sky, Reaper’s nanites slowly wake up and try to heal his body now that the intrusive bones are gone. He has no armor, no money, no form of communication. He disappears regularly enough that his Talon compatriots are likely annoyed but not looking for him. He isn’t even going to be able to walk anywhere until he breaks, resets, and heals his ankles. It’s just the man who is now Reaper, a mask, and an Indiana summer afternoon.

Reaper takes a deep breath of fresh air and closes his eyes. He’ll die, sooner rather than later, likely at the hands of someone he once loved.

Not today, though. Not just yet.

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi on [twitter](https://twitter.com/thereweregiants)


End file.
